Eleanor Burns – Final Defense

Apr 16th @ 12:30

LSC 603

Facts in Advanced Academic Programming that Positively Impact College Readiness in High School Graduates

When it comes to college readiness, high schools in the United States are failing many students, especially students of color, and students of lower-socioeconomic status (SES). This is evident in the number of students who require remediation in college. Remedial classes in English, reading, or mathematics, are non-credit bearing classes meaning that students do not earn credit towards their degree but still have to pay full tuition for these classes. Nationwide, over 50% of community college students (Bailey, Jeong, & Cho, 2010; Complete College America, 2012) and approximately 20% of four-year college students (Complete College America, 2012; Jenkins & Boswell, 2012) have to take at least one remedial class. Large discrepancies are seen across student subgroups, with Latin@ students, Black students, and lower-SES students all disproportionately represented in remedial classes.
Similar discrepancies exist in Colorado. The Colorado Department of Higher Education (2017) reported that in Colorado over 65% of Latin@ students and over 76% of Black students are enrolling in remedial classes in two-year colleges, compared to 47% of their White peers. In Colorado’s four-year colleges, over 39% of Latin@ students and over 52% of Black students need to take remedial coursework, compared to 19% of White students (Colorado Department of Higher Education, 2017). Similar disproportionalities are seen for lower-SES students.
The location of a school also impacts the likelihood that a student will need college remediation. Nationwide, students who attend urban and rural high schools are more likely to require college remediation than students who graduate from suburban high schools (Attewell, Lavina, Dominia, & Levey, 2006). Approximately 52% of urban high school students nationwide – and 40% of rural high school students – require college remediation compared to 38% of their suburban peers (Attewell et al., 2006).
Taking remedial classes has long-term impacts on students. Remedial classes are costly and students who take them are less likely to graduate on time. Each year it is estimated that college remediation cost students and states over $2.3 billion nationwide (Alliance for Education, 2011; Bautsch, 2013). Annually, in Colorado college remediation costs the state approximately $12.8 million and students about $20.4 million (Colorado Department of Higher Education, 2017). According to Complete College America (2012) an additional year in a two- or four- year institution costs a student $16,000 or $23,000 respectively.
The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of some of the Colorado Legacy Schools’ (CLS) program components that target college preparation and readiness and attempt to help students avoid college remediation courses. CLS’ programming includes study sessions, teacher professional development (PD), teacher financial incentives, and student financial incentives among other activities. CLS offers Advanced Placement (AP) summer institute, a two-day fall training, and a mock exam reading session as PD for teachers. These program initiatives were examined to see if they have differential impacts depending on the demographics of the students in participating schools. These demographic characteristics included the percent of Black students and Latin@ students and percent of students of lower-socioeconomic status (SES) in AP English and AP mathematics (math) in CLS-supported schools. The impact of the location of the school – i.e. Denver metro, rural, or suburban/urban – also was examined.
This study also investigated the differential impacts of CLS’ programs on ACT English and ACT math scores, as well as later student enrollment in remedial courses in college. Many colleges use ACT or SAT scores as indicators of whether or not a student requires remediation (Howell, 2011).